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Jan 15, 2025 | 
msn.com | Daisy Hildyard
Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
theguardian.com | Daisy Hildyard
Catherine Airey’s debut novel opens in New York on 9/11. Sixteen-year-old Cora, who is playing truant, watches the news from her apartment, and knows that her father is dead. Michael was an accountant who worked on the 104th floor of the North Tower. Cora’s mother Máire died seven years earlier, so she is now an orphan. Cora tells us all this herself.
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Dec 15, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Daisy Hildyard
If these were extreme responses to the onset of the examination period, it was normal to do the things that Gabriel was doing: turning off his phone so that his family could not reach him; experimenting with cognitive enhancers acquired from the teen-age supplier who worked in the covered market; hiding in the college library at closing time so that he would be locked in to study overnight.
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Nov 29, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Daisy Hildyard
May loses her office job when the “hums” – humanoid robots – render her role obsolete. It’s hard to find work again. She hears of an opportunity to earn several months’ salary by receiving an experimental facial injection, and takes it. The injection will render May’s face unrecognisable to the ubiquitous hums. She’s a guinea pig for a form of adversarial AI, a technology designed to confound the processing of other tech. She returns home in pain, and looking very subtly different.
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Aug 8, 2024 | 
msn.com | Daisy Hildyard
Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.
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Aug 8, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Daisy Hildyard
I recently attended a book event at which an author who was born in the 1990s spoke of a dubious sense that fiction of her generation was expected to deliver “tidings from the internet” to older readers. I thought of this again as I read Mariel Franklin’s debut novel Bonding, a fast, harsh, smart and fun satire of contemporary tech elites. Thirtysomething Londoner Mary loses her job at a lifestyle app called Healthify and is hired by her ex, Lara, founder of Openr, a dating app.
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Mar 28, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Daisy Hildyard
Astronauts often return from their missions with stories of what is known as the overview effect: an intense, sometimes spiritual feeling of awe or love that overwhelmed them when they looked down on Earth from orbit. The image of Earth seen from space, in which the planet appears as a luminous blue-green object floating in darkness, was important to the modern environmental movement at its beginnings in the 1970s, because it showed how fragile the biosphere is.
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Jan 4, 2024 | 
msn.com | Daisy Hildyard
Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.
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Jan 4, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Daisy Hildyard
The world is coming to an end. In a period known as The After, on a coastal area called The Spit, Ava and Anna are waiting for The Wave. Ava, a young woman who sells sex in the woods, is obsessed with Anna: older, wealthier, an influencer and kept wife who has recently lost her daughter Ada to anorexia. Both Anna and Ava are disaffected, distanced from their broken environment and from themselves.
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Nov 15, 2023 | 
theguardian.com | Daisy Hildyard
Lena, a human girl, has grown up alone in the jungle with her AI companion, Mother, also known as Jungle House. Mother is an evolved smart home, a surveillance system with a consciousness and an assertive, fretful voice. She has raised Lena alone and she can’t let Lena forget it. Lena is indigenous to the jungle, though it isn’t clear how and why she arrived at Jungle House as an infant. Now 20, she works as a caretaker for the Morel family, who use it as a holiday home.
